It is not too surprising that Ubuntu came in first in DesktopLinux.com's 2007 Desktop Linux Market Survey, or that Firefox was the topmost browser by far. More interesting is that for the first time ever in the site's annual surveys, GNOME surpassed KDE among desktop environments (45% over 35%), with Xfce a solid third (8%).

We all know (at least, most, I guess) how much Red Hat contributes to Gnome. But due to Ubuntu's popularity on the survey, it skews the numbers of KDE vs Gnome in favor of Gnome. I guess that's what he said.

This year the German newsticker Heise had the survey on it's frontcover for a while. This might explain the large upsurge of Suse usage (by 8% points from last year).

I don't know, is the standard desktop of OpenSuse KDE or Gnome? If it is Gnome (like for commercial Suse), then maybe this is a part of the higher Gnome numbers.

I think what we also see here is the "standard desktop" effect. Ubuntu, Fedora, Redhat, Suse, OpenSuse(?), Debian (and I think most Debian derivates), they all have Gnome as standard desktop. From the large Distros it seems that only Mandriva has set KDE as standard. Even Kubuntu, although not exactly hidden, is not as widely known as Ubuntu, especially not amongst Linux-newbies (which decide about growth numbers. Dell offers Ubuntu pre-installed.
As we can see with MS Explorer, many users do not put in the energy to try out several choices, but stay with what is pre-set.
Maybe KDE is not hitting the big bells enough. On the other hand, KDE is not a company, so a following of 10% would easily suffice to keep the project alive and healthy, which in the end is all that counts for me .